76-2 Freezing and Flowing: Stories of Groundwater-Surface Water Interactions in the Arctic

Session: Contaminants Near Groundwater-Surface Water Interfaces

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In this presentation, we will explore groundwater-surface water interactions occurring across the vast, beautiful, but mostly undocumented regions of the Arctic. Much of the Arctic is quickly changing via rapid warming and hydrologic intensification, with little known about how ground and surface waters interact — now or in the future. A fundamental control on most Arctic environments is permafrost, which is ground that remains frozen for at least two consecutive years and ranges in thickness from centimeters to hundreds of meters. Permafrost effectively separates older, deep subpermafrost groundwater from surface waters across much of the Arctic. Thus, most groundwater-surface water interactions are associated with younger, suprapermafrost groundwater. Here, we will look at a range of projects and discoveries led by our lab that focus on groundwater-surface water interactions in the Arctic. We will explore the seasonal hydrological connections between shallow hillslope groundwater and streams through thawed saturated soils, the development of seasonal hyporheic zones under different types of streams, and the formation of large, beautiful surface ice features created when deep groundwater does occasionally make its way to the surface in Arctic river corridors. As the human footprint continues to rapidly grow in the Arctic via indirect effects like climate change and direct effects like road and infrastructure development, it is rapidly changing groundwater-surface water interactions and their role in the fate and transport of materials, from ecosystem sustaining nutrients to ecosystem threatening contaminants.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Program. Vol. 57, No. 6, 2025

doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-6757

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